Middle English

Definitions

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

proper n. The ancestor language of Modern English, spoken in England and parts of Scotland (where it became Lowland Scots) from about 1100 AD to 1500 AD. It developed from Anglo-Saxon, also called Old English, with heavy influence from French and Latin after the Norman invasion.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English

Mr. Dean, who as a young father regaled his daughters with passages from Geoffrey Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" in Middle English and fed the girls plump blueberries from the back yard, died of a brain aneurysm Dec. 2 at Virginia Hospital Center in Arlington County.

Written in a discursive Middle English, it has inspired several rewrites in modern times, including T.H. White's "The Once and Future King" (1958), the first part of which became the 1963 Disney movie "The Sword in the Stone," and John Steinbeck's "Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights" (1976).

My friend was an English major back in the day, and the ceremony was filled with extended readings — some in Middle English — from First Samuel and First Corinthians, Plato, Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde and William Meredith, as well as traditional and popular music from when the two of them were young.

My family's collective monthly outlay would have any medieval monk doffing his cowl and wishing us whatever the Middle English is for 'nuff respect', but then we have become experts over centuries at surviving on the bare minimum.